“The “Dead Internet Theory” is a concept suggesting that the internet has largely been abandoned by humans and replaced by non-human activity. It posits that most online content, interactions, and engagement metrics are driven by bots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, creating the illusion of a vibrant, human-driven web.”
Yes and no. it depends.
Perhaps I’m wasting my time… but whatever.
If we count non-human traffic then automation/bots were always dominant. Servers check each other’s availability all the time. Scrapper bots existed way before dead internet theory and many services online were just a bot polling some servers repeatedly just to show you collected and processed data. Nothing new.
If we count only bots that pretend to be human then this is more of a modern issue. And it’s a source of sudden growth of interest in invigilation among political elites. After all most of internet-based economy is built on assumption that sites can show advertisements to humans. And often are paid per showing. If those views turned out to be just bots, nobody would want to pay for them. That would pretty much be another financial bubble to pop around the internet, maybe even bigger than AI-bubble itself. Of course any legislated methods of verifying if someone is human will be cracked within days and bots will be certified as humans faster than humans themselves. This is what we learned from all anti-piracy tech spending and there is no reason to hope that human-verification will be any better.
In my personal opinion internet was never human-driven. It was always humans surfing on waves of bots working in unison to keep the thing working. It’s the bots that pretend to be humans who are the problem both for people and for companies. And companies will rather push real humans out of internet than reign the bots in.